Another Awful Bible Interpretation

Here’s U.S. Representative John Shimkus of Illinois reading from the Bible (during a hearing of the Congressional Subcommittee on Energy and Environment) in an effort to justify the idea that we human beings don’t need to take any responsibility for the various ways in which we are destroying our planet. He argues that “only God” can destroy our planet, and since, in Genesis 8, God promised not to destroy the earth, we’ll be fine no matter how poorly we treat God’s creation.

Unfortunately, Shimkus forgets Genesis 1 in which God appoints humanity to be care-takers of God’s creation. For more on just how much we are responsible for taking care of God’s created wonders, according to the Bible, click here. And for more about how St. Bede’s folk are attempting to take that responsibility seriously, click here.

John Rawls, Lapsed Episcopalian

An article in the Times of London Literary Supplement discusses the progressive Christian ideals that served as the foundation for John Rawls’ influential political philosophy.

The writer of A Theory of Justice, and the father of modern American political liberalism, Rawls (who died in 2002) apparently considered entering seminary as a young man and pursuing ordination in the Episcopal Church, but ultimately walked away from the church, earned a Ph.D in philosophy and became one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century.

Recently, his senior philosophy thesis from his time as a Princeton undergrad, written in 1942, and entitled “A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith: An interpretation based on the concept of community,” has been found.

From the Times article:

The moral importance of the separateness of persons, a fundamental theme of Rawls’s work, is strikingly anticipated in the moral and religious conception of community that lies at the heart of the thesis. Rawls proposes that the essential feature of human beings is our capacity for community, that sin deforms our essential nature and destroys community, and that faith is the realization of our nature through integration into community: our “openness” to God and other persons overcomes the terrible aloneness that issues from sin. Although the term “community” may suggest otherwise, the human fellowship in which we realize our nature does not destroy the separateness of individual persons, but is founded on an affirmation of their distinctness. Here is a revealing passage:

“We reject mysticism because it seeks a union which excludes all particularity, and wants to overcome all distinctions. Since the universe is in its essence communal and personal, mysticism cannot be accepted…

Kids Lead Sermon: No Longer Teach

“Teaching” Sunday School has been supremely humbling, in part because the experience has led me to doubt whether we adults believe this Jesus stuff as much as the kids do.

Sure, Jesus’ teachings might sound nice to us, but as adults, they can also sound fairly unbelievable. Even though God’s law may be written on our hearts, typically that law has gotten covered over and obscured by the many callouses that have accumulated over the course of our rough and tumble adult lives.

Love your enemies? Yeah, right—I’d like to see where that gets you. Blessed are the peacemakers? In what world is that true?

Healing can come simply by laying hands on someone? Then why does medical school require four years of school followed by many more of residency training? And why is our country in the throes of a hugely complicated debate about how to provide affordable healthcare to all our fellow citizens? Laying on of hands? Get real.

And the personal fulfillment that comes from sacrifice? Really? Isn’t that just another way of serving as a door-mat to the world? You have to stand up for yourself if you want to get ahead. Don’t let anyone take advantage of you!

But for the sake of the children, we adults try to shelve those feelings–that deep-rooted cynicism–when we enter into Sunday School. And then we start asking the kids about loving enemies and being peacemakers and healing hands and sacrifice, and miraculously, they need no convincing.

[Click below to read the entire sermon.]

Men’s Retreat Tomorrow

On Saturday, March 28, St. Bede’s will hold its fourth annual Men’s Retreat from 10 am to 3 pm. 16 of us guys, including a few members of our youth group, will gather to better get to know one another, and to sing songs like this:

Just kidding. (Sorry: couldn’t resist.)

Click here for how we’ll actually spend our time. In brief we’ll be exploring questions of repentance and reconciliation as inspired by scenes from David Lynch’s “The Straight Story,” and Robert Duvall’s “The Apostle.”

Greening the Archbishop

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams recently gave the Ebor Lecture in Yorkminster spelling out his argument that we humans must respect and serve our natural, God-given world, and that we must recognize the basic truth that we, like the ancient Israelites in the Land of Canaan, are but “resident aliens” of this planet.

Click here to read the whole thing. And click here to listen to it followed by questions and the Archbishop’s answers.

And here’s an excerpt:

[T]he human task is to draw out potential treasures in the powers of nature and so to realise the convergent process of humanity and nature discovering in collaboration what they can become. The ‘redemption’ of people and material life in general is not a matter of resigning from the business of labour and of transformation – as if we could – but the search for a form of action that will preserve and nourish an interconnected development of humanity and its environment.

In some contexts, this will be the deliberate protection of the environment from harm: in a world where exploitative and aggressive behaviour is commonplace, one of the ‘providential’ tasks of human beings must be to limit damage and to secure space for the natural order to exist unharmed. In others, the question is rather how to use the natural order for the sake of human nourishment and security without pillaging its resources and so damaging its inner mechanisms for self-healing or self-correction. In both, the fundamental requirement is to discern enough of what the processes of nature truly are to be able to engage intelligently with them.

And all of this suggests some definitions of what unintelligent and ungodly relation with the environment looks like. It is partial: that is, it refuses to see or understand that what can be grasped about natural processes is likely to be only one dimension of interrelations far more complex than we can gauge. It focuses on aspects of the environment that can be comparatively easily manipulated for human advantage and ignores inconvenient questions about what less obvious connections are being violated…

Kids Heal, Sing, Preach and Lead

This Sunday, March 29, during the 10:15 am service, our Sunday School kids will once again lead our worship by reading from scripture, helping preach, laying hands on those who come forward for healing, and by singing a four different songs over the course of the service (as led by The Rev. Jane McDougle, our associate for music and arts).

For the Offertory Anthem the kids will sing, “The Magic Penny,” a reference to the Pennies For Peace fundraising drive they have just completed, in which they raised money to pay for schools in rural Afghanistan and Pakistan. Here’s a preview of the song (and yes, YouTube does have everything):

Bede’s Bog Pics

This past Saturday a small of group of Bede’s folk began our work on the swath of land in the Palo Alto Baylands that our parish has committed to adopting. We hope to rehabilitate this small piece of land and thereby enable it to host a wide array of animals and plants and to help clean water from the Bay as well as rain-water run-off from the Peninsula.

For now, we are pulling weeds–mostly mustard (ironically enough)–and in November, when the rainy season begins, we will start planting other, more helpful plants. The ranger who set this up said that without us this swath of land would go mostly untended and become a field of mustard sucking up all the water from the soil, thus drying it out and rendering it unable to soak up and clean rain, run-off and Bay water. The tall, dry mustard stalks (seen here in some of these pictures) also make this plot of land uninhabitable for local birds and other wildlife, not to mention other plants (such as the beneficent green pickle-weed which one can actually eat–and one of us did!), which do not rob the soil of all its moisture and provide food and nesting material for birds and other critters.

So here we are, hard at work pulling up weeds.

The “Totalitarianism” of Lawns

Yesterday, The Rev. Joseph Lane alerted me to this New York Times op-ed reprinted from 1991 about the destructive American obsession with creating and maintaining lawns.

The writer of that “classic op-ed,” Michael Pollan (author of the fantastic book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma) urges then-President George H.W. Bush to pull up the iconic White House lawn and replace it with either a meadow, a wet-land, a vegetable garden or (his personal favorite) an orchard.

All of these options would be much better for the environment than is a lawn and perhaps, he argues, such a small physical act might have a profound symbolic effect upon the habits of Americans and their own work to preserve their ever-problematic lawns.

His argument reminded me of what we have learned while working to rehabilitate our local watershed, specifically the swath of land we have adopted in the Palo Alto Baylands–our very own Bede’s Bog–as well as what we will explore during our upcoming Eco-Camp this August.

We must seek to understand the complex power of our ecosystems so as to work collaboratively with them to provide for humanity in a way that doesn’t subjugate and ultimately destroy our natural environments. In so doing, we are not only collaborating with birds and worms and dirt and water and fish and plants, we are collaborating with God.

Writes Pollan:

Beginning in the 19th century, at the urging of such landscape designer-reformers as Frederick Law Olmsted and Andrew Jackson Downing, we took down our old-world walls and hedges (which they had declared to be “selfish” and “undemocratic”) and spread an uninterrupted green carpet of turfgrass across our yards, down our streets, along our highways and, by and by, across the entire continent.

Sermon: Jesus Christ, Anti-Venom

To this day our guild of professional healers, trained at the best western schools of medicine, use a symbol as their professional standard bearing two snakes coiled upon a sword. The allusion in the emblem is to the Greek God Aesclepius, son of Apollo (aha, a son of a god), aka the Roman god Aesculapius, both divinities associated with medicine and healing. You will find this symbol in your doctor’s office…

The Latin word serpent means creepy crawlie, but the Hebrew scripture refers to the serpent as capable of flight. They’re said to infest the Negev and to sting like blazes. The pests are probably poisonous insects that can crawl and fly. To counter the uproar among the bitten Israelites, God tells Moses to fashion a bronze serpent and affix it atop a staff, perhaps the famous staff of the Red Sea crossing, to serve as an antidote.

We might make an analogy to inoculation theory or perhaps to the placebo effect. Whatever, it works. It helps people heal. As we know, healing is complicated and mysterious and full of grace all at once. The serpent aloft became for the people a sign of their purgation and salvation…

Let’s imagine in our mind’s eye an amalgam of every crucifix we’ve ever seen, only Aesculapian. Picture Jesus, son of man and son of God, entwined with Adam the earthling, in an embrace, affixed atop a pole, let’s say upon the cross, uplifted on a highly visible hill outside Roman occupied Jerusalem. Like Isaiah in the temple, we in this sanctuary are given an image of the divine potential, of divine power, made accessible to humankind, in the embrace of our progenitors in flesh and spirit. Like the first, Jesus is called the second Adam, Everyman, or preferably, Everyone. And the flying serpent, the seraph, stings our lips with pentecostal fire, giving the gift of the gospel proclamation…

[Click below for the complete sermon.]

A Peek Inside The Sunday School Curriculum

In Sunday School this week, we’ll be helping the kids link Jesus’ ideas and examples that we’ve already discussed, namely: healing, loving (specifically: loving enemies), peace-making, and giving to Jesus’ idea and example of sacrificing. All of these words describe what the kids are doing through the Pennies For Peace drive (which we’re wrapping up this Sunday, incidentally, so that we can announce our total haul at the Kids Lead next Sunday, March 29). We will write out these words for the kids on the easel and review them all and their connection to the Pennies For Peace drive before then introducing them to the idea of “sacrifice.”

After that we will tell them the story of the widow who gives a couple of copper coins or pennies (“all that she had”) for the sake of the poor in Mark 12: 41-44. And then to further illustrate the idea of sacrifice and tie it to Pennies For Peac, we could ask them what else they might have spent the money on that they’re giving to Pennies For Peace–a toy? clothes? candy? Then we can emphasize that whatever else they might have spent that money on has been sacrificed for the sake of helping build schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Guess How Many Pennies For Peace

This Sunday, March 22, will be our last day of collecting pennies as part of our Pennies For Peace campaign. For the past couple of months, our Sunday School kids have been bringing in pennies and other spare change to raise funds for the Central Asia Institute and their ongoing work building and maintaining schools in rural Afghanistan and Pakistan.

So this Sunday, following both the 8 am and 10:15 am services, we will have the big jar full of all the pennies and change we’ve collected out in the Great Hall. And we invite everyone willing to kick in some change to guess how much money we’ve raised. The one whose guess is closest to the correct amount will win a copy of Greg Mortenson’s bests-selling book about how he founded the Central Asia Institute, Three Cups of Tea.

Social Entrepreneur 5: Fabio Rosa

In chapter 3 of David Bornstein’s How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas (Oxford, 2007), there is the story of Fabio Rosa, a Brazilian agronomic engineer who revolutionized the way Brazilian farmers get access to water with the help of cheap, low-tech electrical systems in rural Palmares, Brazil. (For all posts in our social entrepreneur series, click here.)

Rosa was raised a gaucho and trained as an agronomic engineer. A classmate invited him to southern Brazil, to meet his father, Ney Azevedo, then the governor of the state of Palmares, in Rio Gradne do Sul, a rural farming region of Brazil similar to the Mississippi River delta. Over dinner Rosa and Azevedo talked about how to improve life for the local villagers of Palmares. Azevedo ultimately asked Rosa to become secretary of agriculture for the state.

Rosa accepted and began to talk with the area’s farmers about their needs. The rural villages wanted to boost rice production and farm income, but a quarter of their production cost was for water.

Rosa found a book by a Brazilian who had learned of artesian well irrigation for rice production in Louisiana. But Brazilian electrification was designed and delivered by high-tech standards for large producers, pricing the poor out of the system. Rosa found Ennio Amaral at the Federal Technical School at the nearby city of Pelotes. Amaral had developed a low-tech, inexpensive electrical system for rural areas.

All We Like Sheep…

We all know that Jesus is The Good Shepherd. These guys are “extreme”-ly good shepherds. And they call themselves The Baaa-Studs.

Sermon: Trying to Put God Into Words

Our language and our learning generally do not serve us well in our attempts to articulate quite what it is that we are experiencing when exposed to the astounding beauty and joy and sorrow of life. Words are better for simpler needs and feelings. In the face of the big ones, love and loss for example, we often find ourselves silent, finding our most authentic response being one of absolute presence.

I think each one of us has experience of that place, and has our own way of attempting to put the indescribable into words. I know that in that place I am in the presence of so much more than I can understand. I can describe some of its qualities. I can know of its all-encompassing timelessness, its limitlessness, its energy. I can know that it is love, even though it is a love that I cannot understand.

Now, here’s the leap. I know that in that place of absolute presence, I am, to the extent of my human capabilities, amidst what my religious framework has taught me to call ‘God’.

What an insignificant little collection of arbitrary shapes to attempt to label such an immense reality. Perhaps it would have been less confusing if we hadn’t even tried.

Words can lead us into such a lot of trouble. They can distort and limit our thinking. They make it easy for us to make judgments. They lead us into self-deception. They allow us to explain ourselves away at others’ expense. They lead us to prescribe irrelevant and limiting “correctness” for other people.

[Click below for the complete sermon.]

Before We All Burn

Someone made a home-made music video of Death Cab For Cutie’s “Before We All Burn” (see below) that references this past summer’s California wildfires and the huge impact they had on communities throughout our state. It’s a touching testament and it reminded me of one of the many reasons why we are doing the Watershed Rehab work we’ve begun this year.

This Saturday, March 21, 9:30 – 11:30 am, that work continues at our adopted site (yes, we’re calling it “Bede’s Bog”) in the Palo Alto Baylands near the duck pond. Please join us and help weed out the invasive plants that tend to suck the moisture out of our local environment, leaving behind dry husks of grass that easily burn and lead to those devastating wildfires. All ages are encouraged to come help.

Of Presses and Parishes

Yesterday, I read this blog post by Clay Shirky about the unfortunate demise of the local daily newspaper. (Shirky is a freelance writer with a focus on technological issues and he also teaches a “New Media” class as an adjunct professor at NYU.) In it, he argues that the necessity of drastically changing the way that newspapers do business was fairly obvious at least 15 years ago, but that very little real change was implemented and so most local dailies, once cultural institutions, are now on the brink of failing all over the country (the Seattle Post-Intelligencer just stopped its presses for good and will now operate only as a news website with a skeleton staff, and our own San Francisco Chronicle is in dire straits, just to name two prominent examples).

I bring this up because there are similar concerns that have been out there for years regarding the growth (or lack there-of) of the Episcopal Church and other mainline American Protestant churches. St. Bede’s is a very healthy and robust parish with strong children and youth ministries as well as a vibrant cadre of young adults who are actively engaged with the life of the parish as a whole, as well as a wide array of outreach ministries which extend our mission and message throughout the wider Bay Area community. But many parishes are struggling to attract and maintain younger congregants and are struggling to make ends meet financially and don’t have the resources to actively reach out to the wider community. Why? And what is to be done about it?

One could offer many, many reasons. (Bede’s Blog’s discussion of the recent Trinity College religious-affiliation poll here and here offers one important reason.) But all those reasons could be summed up by the fact that our culture has radically changed since the hey-day of the Episcopal Church in the 1950’s and 1960’s. For years, the church has attempted to address those cultural shifts and prayerfully attempted to stay true to the Gospel while framing Jesus’ message of peace and love and hope in a way that will resonate to young Americans of today. If we believe that Jesus’ teaching and example offer a universal path toward God, toward that which is good and right and true, then cultural revolutions should not be able to keep us from spreading our faith.

Oboe, Organ, Millennia Too!

This Sunday, March 22, at 4 pm, St. Bede’s Arts Series will present the oboe and organ duo known as “Millennia Too!” with Alison Luedecke on the organ and Susan Barrett on the oboe (as well as the oboe d’amore and the English horn).

They will be performing works by Bach and Handel plus modern compositions including one by Bay Area composer, John Hirten, of St. Stephen’s Church in Belvedere. Tickets are $25, $18 for seniors. Students may attend free.

Mary Nursing and Modern Lactivism

This Thursday, March 19, 6:30 – 9 pm, St. Bede’s will present dinner (7-8 pm) and a presentation (8-9 pm) by Priscilla Hexter, former Director and Curator of Stanford University’s Art Spaces, entitled “The Nursing Madonna: Sacred or Profane.”

In particular, Priscilla will touch upon the recent dust-up regarding Facebook’s decision to delete images of mothers nursing their children after deeming them “obscene.” (For one Silicon Valley mom’s opinion on this decision, click here.)

Back in December, a bunch of women staged a “nurse-in” by suckling their children on the street outside of Facebook’s downtown Palo Alto offices on the same day that thousands of women around the world uploaded to Facebook images of themselves nursing, designating them their personal “profile picture.”

In reading about this, I learned a new word–”lactivism”–the meaning of which I assume one can guess.

An American Via Media?

More thoughts regarding that recent Trinity College survey of Americans regarding religious affiliation that Bede’s Blog referenced last week–this time from Andrew Sullivan in the Times of London and Frank Rich in the New York Times.

Sullivan and Rich are both interested in the fact that the fastest rising self-classification since 1990, according to the survey, is “no affiliation,” which jumped from 8 percent to 15 percent over the past 18 years. This finding is coupled with the fact that “no affiliation” is now the third most populous group behind only “Catholic” and “Baptist.”

Rich sees this as evidence that scientific modes of thought are finally beginning to, in some sense, emerge victorious in the long-standing “culture war.” Sullivan, meanwhile, longs for an American via media–a middle way between thoughtless fundamentalism on the one hand and on the other hand, rigid anti-religiosity (typified by the “new atheism” Bede’s Blog has discussed previously). Sullivan argues that this American via media used to be occupied by mainline Protestant churches, including the Episcopal Church. However, as we all know, the rise of evangelical fundamentalism and atheism has coincided with the decline of mainline Protestantism–including the decline of the Episcopal Church.

But I really like the idea that our role as Episcopalians (and Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists, etc.) is to provide a middle way between atheism and fundamentalism. Can we get the word out and let our fellow Americans know that there is such a via media available to them?

Click below for the excerpts.

Sermon: Biblical Bait and Switch

I was glad to receive an invitation to preach today. I was happy, that is, until I read the assigned lessons.

First we hear of God’s covenant with Abraham. Here are Abram and Sarai, these ‘wandering Aramaens’, to whom God promises more than they could’ve asked or imagined; God promises them the world.

I don’t know about you, but I’m with Peter. I have a hard time getting from that seemingly very open-ended promise to Jesus’ words, “If any want to become my followers, let them…take up their cross and follow me…For what will it profit them to gain the whole world” — the same world, presumably, that we just heard God give Abraham and Sarah — “and forfeit their life?” First, God promises the world to Abraham, Sarah, and their heirs, and then Jesus seems to suggest it’s all for naught.

Yes, I’m with St. Peter. What’s with this lectionarial juxtaposition — God’s covenant with Abraham and Sarah on the one hand, and Jesus’ call to take up the cross on the other? Do you see what I mean? Is this a matter of biblical bait and switch?